How do you train someone to become a great manager? How easy or difficult is to train someone on leadership skills?
Are classroom training programs or online training programs on leadership skills enough?
A great leader never gets manufactured in a classroom. Why? Because leadership has lot got to do with behavioral and attitude change and this kind of change cannot be achieved through ordinary training programs. Great leadership skill need to come from within and that is very difficult to achieve.
As the saying goes” You can take the horse to water, but never make him drink it“.You can give people tips on leadership skills but you cannot get the leader out of them.
What if you can persuade people to perform? How about persuading someone to do something that you want him to do? Be it a behavioural change or an attitude change, how about using technology to achieve this? Interesting?
Yes, it is interesting indeed.
Using technology you can persuade someone to do something that you want them to do. This is not new. This is something that you are used to. You are used to getting persuaded by technology.
- Online advertisements are persuasive. You go to a website. There is a pop up with attractive visuals that says “Click here to win.” The advertisement is persuading you to click on the banner.
- Facebook is persuasive. The whole site is designed in a way that you feel like visiting the site again and again.
- Mafia Wars is persuasive. You are feel like playing the game all the time.
The examples above illustrate how websites and games are designed to persuade people to play a game, visit a site or click on an advertisement.
Let us now look at one other interesting example of persuasive technology for learning/training. A company called Realityworks offers parenting programs for young people to create awareness about parenting and childcare. So what do they do? They develop robotic babies that behave and act like real babies.
If you enroll for this parenting program, you will be given this robotic baby to take care of and the baby must be fed, put to sleep diapered around the clock. The baby will keep track of how well you take care of it and will respond. Interesting? Strange? Whatever it may be. Technology here is being used in a innovative fashion to bring about a change in behavior which might be difficult to achieve through an awareness session or through a mentor.
Check out these interesting videos about Real Care Baby:
The parenting programs designed by RealityWorks is to control teen pregnancy. Read more on this here.
Persuasive technologies give you a real experience and can work wonders to bring about a behavioral and attitude change. The study of such persuasive technologies is called Captology. This term was coined by BJ Fogg.
I learnt about Captology and found the interesting example of Baby Care in this social network called: PINOT.
It is really interesting to note the way technology is being used to bring about a behavioral and attitude change.
Have you come across some such examples? Please feel free to share it.
Hi Rupa,
I enjoyed reading the blog post. It triggered questions and tempted me to reflect on my own views.
“How do you train someone to become a great manager?”
– You don’t. There is no guaranteed course of training to make good managers. For decades, the management schools have argued that ‘managers are born, not made’. Can any amount of training guarantee a Sachin Tendulkar? No. The same goes for any other profession. A training program is concerned with basic aspects of concept and application. But that is not enough to make one good or great. It is the talent that creates the special acumen in most great professionals.
Just like theories, styles and methods in ID, a training program can teach you very basics. Case studies can tell s about certain strategies that were innovative – leading to success. But they never pose to be a set pattern.
The same goes for leadership skills. You can teach someone what leadership skill is all about. What qualities should be nurtured to foster leadership. But you cannot necessarily make him a great leader. Think of some of the great emperors who conquered vast territories of land down the history. How much of training did they get? In most cases leaders and managers are self motivated people who can identify their goals and objectives and achieve them through pragmatic planning, execution and coordination of their teams and other resources.
So far so good. I agree with you. The examples of persuasive actions can be seen differently. I would say it is the product or service that generates the interest of the user. technology is a tool that supports the product or service and compliments the product/service with its convenience. Just think of it. You need to stay in touch with your loved ones. In the last century, you would write a letter or send a telegram to communicate with them. Even a decade ago, you would make a telephone call to establish the communication link faster. These days you would use the mobile phone or the internet for an instant touch. The speed and quality of communication has improved with the advent of technology, but the basic need –need to contact and communicate remains the same. Technology only evolves around our needs, it does not necessarily create a need or persuades us to change our behaviour/attitude beyond the ease of its use.
Talking about simulative learning, we say that the best thing about them is that they are risk free learning. Agreed. But remember parenting is far greater than feeding, changing nappies and putting the babies off to sleep. It is all about feeling…knowing which cry is for hunger and which is for a colic pain. For the past 60 odd years Dr Benjamin Spock’s book: baby and child care’ is one of the biggest best sellers simply because it tells you how to handle your baby in every possible way. But neither the robotic simulation, nor Spock persuaded people to become parents. A mother knows how to look after her baby by instinct, even animals know that. As they say ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. The necessity is the persuasion itself. The book or the robotics are tools to accomplish them.
The urge to learn is the persuasion, e-learning is the tool.